


The Waltz of the Force

by Lokei



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Jedi, Lightsabers, Loss, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-29
Updated: 2008-01-29
Packaged: 2017-10-20 05:37:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/209330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Padawan in pain seeks a way to find his way back to the light of the Force.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Waltz of the Force

“Sparring,” the Master said quietly, “is as much like dancing as it is like any other art.” Her long arms fell loosely at her sides, extinguished lightsaber in one hand, held as lightly as a single long-stemmed urla-flower.

It was with this hand that she gestured slightly, and the student watched the movement hungrily, trying to understand how such a small motion could nonetheless ripple from her fingertips right up her body so that, without seeming to have moved, her stance had shifted from passivity to readiness. Feeling all the awkwardness of his own gangly limbs, he brought himself to mirror her stance, and realized with a start that the Master was still talking in her voice like a dozen windchimes.

“It is not just the acrobatics enhanced by the Force,” she was saying, “nor the ability to overwhelm your opponent by speed or strength or sheer power which is at the heart.” She smiled and shifted to a classic opening form. It was one he knew so well he could have been born knowing it, and it was this slow pattern of parry-riposte which they now mimed, sabers still disengaged as the Master continued.

“These things are the bedrock of all you have already been taught,” she said, “the same things I was taught when I was in your place.”

The student boggled at her despite himself. The Master came from a long-lived race—his unknown father’s grandfather would have barely been born when she was an apprentice his age. If the Master was amused at his response, she showed little sign of it save for the tell-tale twitching of her pointed pale gold ears.

“These things,” she repeated, “you could learn from any other master.” Her eyes were serious now, though the hint of a smile remained. “Why are you here?”

The student bit the corner of one chapped lip and replied almost voicelessly. “To learn the dance.” After a moment’s pause, he realized it was true. After his Master’s death, he had been shuttled from temporary teacher to teacher, joyless and dulled to all reactions, to the point he feared he might never feel the true light of the Force again. Then one day he saw her sparring with another Master, and it was then that he knew she understood something, something he still sought.

“You spar like you hear music,” he said, “that carries you away.”

She nodded now, pleasure coloring the bell tones of her words. “It is not enough to be strong, or agile, or fast,” she said, “you must also feel the balance, hear the rhythm, and,” she winked at him, so slowly he barely recognized it as one, “you must try to follow as your partner leads.”

The student felt a familiar wrinkle start between his eyebrows as he tried to understand. Words had always been more of a stumbling block on the path to understanding for him, which many of his temporary teachers had been in their turn unable to comprehend. But not her.

“Come,” she said. “Some things are better felt than said.”

With that, he felt the furrow disappear and he followed her unquestioningly across the silent gymnasium. When she leapt easily to a chest-high balance beam and turned her expectant gaze on him, however, he felt all the flushes of a dozen clumsy moments rush burning to his face.

“Balance,” she said, walking lightly backwards and forwards on the slender beam. “Balance is something every Jedi must strive for, in dancing, in sparring, in life.”

She generously overlooked his awkward landing on the beam and waited for him to steady himself before beginning the first form again.

“Balance comes from trust,” she added. “But in whom or in what do you trust, apprentice?”

Once again, the student found himself gaping at her wordlessly. He knew the answers he should be giving—but at the death of his Master, all those easy answers had vanished like a spent laser blast, leaving only a burnt crater behind.

“Master,” he said, “I know what you would have me say, but—“

“Not what I would have you say, but what your heart knows, young one.”

“A Jedi trusts the Force,” the student said obediently, “and his Master.”

“And?” she prompted, switching on her saber and prompting him to do the same.

“And,” he repeated in confusion as his blade snapped to life, blue as a shadow on freshly fallen snow.

Her blade, green as the light caught in the heart of an emerald, hovered beside his as she paused to make her point.

“A Jedi trusts himself, as well,” she said, “One cannot surrender to the will of the Force if one fears to lose control.”

She tapped his blade lightly with her own.

“His death was not your fault,” she said softly, bringing his attention back from the depths to which it hat strayed. “You can learn no more if you continue to bear the fear and guilt which are not yours to take. You must let go.”

The words broke from him involuntarily and he stumbled backwards on the beam.

“But I couldn’t save him! What if I’m not meant to be a Jedi?”

It was the question that hung over his head always, like a sword on an ever-thinning string, ready to plunge into his heart should he ever let down his guard.

He expected her to laugh at him, or possibly to lecture him, or even to shake her head and tell him he did not deserve to be a Jedi with that kind of attitude. He expected anything but what actually happened.

She extinguished her blade, ducked under his, leaned in, and gave him a hug. He doused his own blade in reflex, and felt the numbness that coated him seeping away. He didn’t think he’d had a hug since his crèche days.

She stepped back and looked at him seriously.

“All of us ask that question sooner or later,” she said. “Even those who appear most confident or most experienced. I lived with your same doubts for years—terrible as it is to lose a Master, it is more terrible still to lose a Padawan.”

He gazed at the pain readable in her wide and slightly opalescent eyes. “How did you bear it?” he whispered.

“I danced,” she said in a whisper of her own, “until I recognized myself in the Force’s melody once more.”

Deep inside him, something clicked into place, so that even his unpredictable adolescent center of gravity stilled and settled to a proper balance. He bowed his head a moment, and when he raised it, there was a rare flicker of hope in his previously deadened eyes.

“Will you teach me?”

A nod, and their blades sprang to meet each other once more, casting blue and green shadows bouncing across the room as two surefooted Jedi crossed the network of balance beams and hurdles as fluidly as a waltzing pair in an empty ballroom.

Turn. Parry. Lunge. Deflect. Block. Riposte. Flip. Flow.

And then there was silence as the Master indicated the end of the final form.

As the echoes of the lightsabers faded, the student knelt gracefully on the beam, almost exactly where they had started. He felt an answering rhythm beat up from the soles of his feet to mingle with the chimes of the Master’s voice.

“Well done, Padawan.”

The smile that greeted him was an open chord, repeated with a leading variation.

“Well done, my Padawan.”

And he smiled.


End file.
